Things We Shipped::November & December 2017

New Story is a nonprofit that builds homes and communities for families living in survival mode around the world. We believe technology is a force multiplier for good. Learn more here: newstorycharity.org

It seems like the theme for these past two months has been “Users” and how to let users access to the “Monolith” and use it more effectively. (The “Monolith” is what we call our our custom built CRM & operations tool.)

User Permissions

As of today, everybody that has access to the Monolith is a New Story team member, but what about the volunteers that help us translate our surveys, writers that help craft our family profiles, and country surveyors that help us create intake surveys? It takes a village to do what we do! Insert here — user permissions. Many lines of codes and about 800 unit tests later, we now have different roles for admins, staff, translators, and writers to name a few.

Translations

Now that translators have restricted access to the Monolith, they needed a place to actually translate the family information we capture during our survey process. So, we built an interface to be able to translate the impact surveys coming from the survey mobile tool. This will save countless hours of having to navigate excel sheets and copy/paste between different screens.

Family Story Writing

Family profiles are a big part of our process. Each New Story family has a profile publicly viewable online. However, after family stories are written, one person from our team had to input them into our Monolith system one by one. Imagine having to do this for communities with over 100 families! Because of this, we also built an interface for our writers to be able to easily craft our family profiles. So after a family goes through the translation process a New Story volunteer/intern will craft their story enabling donors to connect with each family and ultimately fund their home.

Pledges

New Story has two separate bank accounts: one for home donations and one for our company expenses. Our “Builders” are the private group of donors that fund New Story’s operations (staff, travel, biz expenses, etc). Most of them make annual pledges or commitments to donate to New Story. We needed a better way of tracking our Builder commitments in the Monolith. No more Excel spreadsheets to keep track of our $$$!

Happy Holidays! Thank you for building New Story with us!